Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

When a person is so self-absorbed and self-impressed that they are not interested in or capable of making room for another perspective or another person, someone might say “He is full of himself.” The purpose of the traditional three-fold spiritual practices of Lent— prayer, fasting, and almsgiving— is to make us less full of ourselves, to make us more mindful of making room for that which and those whom are more important than us and our own private agendas.

In prayer (especially silent meditation) we create a vacancy reserved for God, where only God can dwell. By fasting and abstaining from meals or certain foods we intentionally create a symbolic, physical hunger that reminds us of both those who are needlessly hungry in a world of plenty and our need for the soul food that alone can ultimately satisfy our deepest hunger. In and through almsgiving we take the money saved from meals not eaten and adding to it give it to someone who is poor. We make room in our hearts for the needy stranger or neighbor to remind ourselves what it will take to recreate a world where all can live peacefully and justly— kindness, deep sympathy, generous love, and compassionate action.

Can such simple practices change the world? Who knows? But if each of us tended wholeheartedly to these enacted gestures of making room, they very well might change us. And that’s a good start to rolling into what Dorothy Day called “a revolution of the heart.” We participate in these practices for personal transformation in the hopes that in some small but important way we might be changed for the good and for the common good.

These practices are simple, humble gestures. But they are enough, if done with deliberation and devotion, to cultivate a way of being and living that reflects the ethos of the reign of God that Jesus embodies and expresses.

The thing about creating space is that something has to be removed, discarded, or let go of in order to make room for the “other”— God, awareness of what’s ultimate and essential, the human person. It’s as simple and difficult as that.

~ djm